Friday, August 4, 2017

Bail Agents, You Lost Me

If you look at my blog over
time, you’ll see that I started by trying to send messages to people in the
bail reform movement concerning what I called the “basics” of bail, like the
definitions of terms and phrases, etc.

Later, it sort of morphed
into a platform to illuminate all of the manure that the bail insurance
companies were spreading. Along the way, I figured I owed it to bail agents
everywhere to let them know about the bail insurance antics and to tell those
agents that there could be a place for them in bail reform, if they would only
distance themselves from those companies. After all, I liked bail agents, and I
sort of figured they were all like me – interested in the right to bail,
liberty, and freedom. You know, all that stuff in our constitutions.

Well, nobody’s listening. And
so, bail agents, you’ve officially lost any support I might have given you in
the past. After seeing a number of posts by PBUS, “The National Voice of the
Bail Agent,” I now just assume you all agree with their strategy to fight
everything, align themselves with idiots and publicity hounds, and turn the bail reform movement – something your
industry could have helped with – into a mean circus. Today I see the insurance
companies attacking New Mexico Supreme Court Chief Justice Charles Daniels personally. How, exactly, does
that help your cause and not turn judges against you everywhere?

Yesterday, I witnessed a video in which the
illustrious leader of PBUS chased down a person with a microphone with someone
shouting, “George Soros!” over and over. Based on what these guys are saying
(and remember, PBUS is your “voice”), I’m now questioning whether you even care
about the right to bail. Listening to PBUS, all you apparently care about is accountability
(a punishment term) and making sure you don’t have to hug thugs. Frankly, if
that’s true, you shouldn’t be in bail at all. You should all become prison
guards. Do you realize how damaging it is for the people leading your
opposition – PBUS and ABC – to basically abandon any notion that you care about
the right to bail, what the Supreme Court called “the right to freedom before
conviction?”

I was the only person on this
side of the movement who thought you had a place in the future of pretrial
release and detention, and now I don’t. It’s my fault. I honestly thought bail
bondsmen understood their own history and their potential to help America
through this generation of reform. I’ve been writing this for years now, but
nobody is listening, and so now I don’t think I owe your industry anything.

From now on, you guys get
lumped in with the insurance weasels. And I’m personally going to spend all my
spare time convincing judges to simply stop setting surety bonds. And if they
simply stop setting surety bonds, don’t ever say you weren’t repeatedly warned.

About Me

Hello everyone! I'm a criminal justice system analyst with 25 years of legal experience. I was editor-in-chief of the law journal in law school, and I worked as a law clerk to a federal appellate judge right after graduation. I then worked in private practice for several years in Washington DC before I came back to Colorado, where I became interested in criminal justice. I worked for both the state and federal courts of appeals as a staff attorney doing criminal appeals, and I also taught at Washburn Law School for a year before I got involved in the local criminal justice system issues in Jefferson County, Colorado. In that job I quickly realized that there was a lot of room for criminal justice reform, and that's what I've been doing ever since.

For the past several years I've been working on reforming America's traditional system of administering bail. Believe me, it really needs it. I started this blog because I was getting somewhat fed up with all of the slanted misinformation and self-serving research and analyses circulated in the field. This is my little way of chiming in.

I think I've had plenty of formal education, and I hope I'm not forced to get any more (although I'm taking two classes on Coursera!). I have a law degree, a masters of law degree, and a masters of criminal justice degree in addition to the two degrees that I got in college.

I am currently the Executive Director of a Colorado nonprofit called the Center for Legal and Evidence-Based Practices. It serves as my platform for performing neutral and objective research and analysis of topics relating to bail and pretrial justice. I hope that you'll get something out of this blog, which will undoubtedly contain a few things you aren't likely to find anywhere else.